“... Galip, are esoteric commentaries on Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Mathnawi – a 13th-century work which Robert Irwin has described as ‘a great sprawling series of stories within stories’ in which ‘the inner stories . . . indicate the mystical meanings of the outer stories’ – the reader’s head starts to throb. It’s also true that Borges-style novels ...”

“... repressed pain, I think, behind a sentence quoted approvingly by Bayley in his essay here on Robert Lowell. It is Lowell on Stevens, but it could be Bayley on Bayley: ‘There seems to be something in the poet that protects itself by asserting that it is not making too much of an ...”

“... compared with later examples. In 1983, Elvis Costello’s poignant ‘Shipbuilding’ (sung by Robert Wyatt) was so sidelong a comment on the human costs and economic benefits of the Falklands War that you had to be told that’s what it was. I even have a sneaking sympathy for the campaign agent who chose Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the ...”

“... to check any strenuous effort’ was a common deterrent to excessive involvement in a career. Robert Mackintosh ‘could continue to solicit from his father’s old friends civil service appointments with titles more impressive than the responsibilities they carried. There was no need for him to concern himself with a salary.’ The same confident ...”

“... did A.J.P. Taylor very much good – any more than it did Michael Foot, Harold Nicolson, Robert Bruce-Lockhart, Tom Driberg or any of the other literati who seem to have lost a dimension in the service of that heterogeneous collection of unlikeable lost causes that Beaverbrook picked up. Taylor wrote that the Express was what England would have been ...”

“... intended to harm Palestinian civil society’. In December the American political scientist Robert Pape described it as ‘one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history’.What strategic bombing does to a city is to produce, by military means, something similar to the massive urban destruction of last year’s earthquakes in Turkey ...”

“... saviour and leader, yet refused to reduce the size of his army. In 1817, the British officer Robert Wilson pointed out that Russia’s population had grown from 22 million to at least 42 million since 1762. In 1828, de Lacy Evans estimated that Russia’s population was 50 million and would reach 73 million in another fifteen years. Since the ...”

“... There was also the fact that Pratt and Smith’s case was considered at the same time as that of Robert Swan, who had been found guilty of having extorted money by falsely accusing a gentleman of a homosexual approach, but whose version of events (he really had been approached) had been supported by new testimony. After long debate, Swan’s sentence was ...”

“... you have achieved it: in the great work of self-knowledge there have always been helping hands. Robert Burns reckoned that other people can know something about us that we do not or cannot know: ‘O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!’ Some of that external expertise involves reading the surfaces we present to the ...”

“... offered her a retainer of a thousand pounds a year: ‘Let me know how funny you think this is.’ Robert Yeatman (who took over as Spark’s editor at Macmillan) once dared to query the phrasing of a single sentence in The Girls of Slender Means and was told: ‘It’s exactly what I intend, and the style is my own. I’m sorry if you don’t like it; but ...”

“... a literary enterprise organically connected to his career as poet, philosopher and historian. Like Robert Graves, he admitted that he preferred certain books – the Latin classics and the works of Augustine – to others. In fact, he went so far as to make a list of his preferences, provocatively titled ‘My favourite books: I resort to the others not as a ...”

“... manufactured by Dow in large quantities and then deployed in the firebombings of Berlin and Tokyo. Robert Neer, a historian of napalm, quotes a Japanese medical professor describing the carnage: ‘There was no one to rescue. If you touched one of the roasted bodies, the flesh would crumble in your hand. Humanity was reduced to its chemical properties, turned ...”

“... European culture – and as part of ‘high culture’, in ways outlined by Peter Burke and Robert Darnton. Science and technology can then be distinguished, and theoretical advances, in, say, the earth sciences, are not assumed always to have produced great practical breakthroughs. As one of the contributors, Steven Shapin, neatly turns it, Was ist ...”

“... apparently struck by a train during one of his blackouts). Spencer’s reputation as a poet, like Robert Graves’s and Lawrence Durrell’s, has always been tainted by his association with the Mediterranean, an injustice which the Collected Poems, intelligently edited by Roger Bowen, seeks to put right. The volume shows how travel encouraged in Spencer both ...”

“... they brought the author. The Clarendon edition, along with the Pilgrim Edition of the Letters and Robert Patten’s Dickens and his Publishers (OUP, 1978), will eventually provide us with the fullest account yet of Victorian fiction publishing. The tailor-made publishing history offered by the Clarendon editor is absolutely crucial in the case of Martin ...”